Religious Experience in Earliest Christianity: A Missing Dimension in New Testament Studies by Luke Timothy Johnson (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 495 The present volume dearly deserves the attention of scholars pursuing the study of medieval philosophy and theology. But it also should draw the notice of Church historians and historians of canon law for whom it may give some insight into the tradition of thought and feeling behind those involved in the later Poverty Controversy of the fourteenth century. The editors are to be commended for the remarkable job they have done of assembling such important texts and offering them in such well-documented and readable editions, while the Franciscan Institute is to be applauded for its efforts to make texts of such significance available at prices affordable to impecunious scholars. The Catholic University ofAmerica Washington, D.C. TIMOTHY B. NOONE Religious Experience in "Earliest Christianity: A Missing Dimension in New Testament Studies. By LUKE TIMOTHY JOHNSON. Minneapolis, Minn.: Fortress Press, 1998. Pp. vii+ 199. $20.00 (paper). ISBN 0-8006-3129-3. This book can be considered an intermediate step between two other works by Johnson: The Real Jesus (1996), a theological apologetics that responds to the "misguided quest for the historical Jesus" by asserting the "the truth of the traditional Gospels," and LivingJesus (1999) which "reflects on the person of Jesus as good news." The purpose of this book is to call attention to and legitimate the fact that faith experience forms the matrix and subject of the discourse we find in the literature of earliest Christianity. Johnson rightly points to this "missing dimension in New Testament studies," the result of a mentality that systematically overlooks what is central in the New Testament witness. He sets about legitimating the reality of earliest Christian experience by recourse to a particular application of the phenomenology of religion which is neither history nor theology (vii). There are five chapters in the book. Chapter 1, "What's Missing from Christian Origins," dearly establishes the fact of a methodological bias which eliminates experience as a category when investigating the beginnings of Christianity. Chapter 2 is an attempt to set up an objective approach that is modeled on work done in the field of the general phenomenology of religion and at the same time respects the reality of early Christian religious experience. This is accomplished by a judicious use of the work of M. Eliade, G. Van der Leeuw, G. Marcel, and especially J. Wach. Chapters 3, 4, and 5 apply the four 496 BOOK REVIEWS components ofJ. Wach's definition of religious experience to three public areas of early Christian experience, namely, baptism, glossolalia, and sacred meals. This is a pioneering work which the author hopes will stimulate further research and reflection. The basic challenge that it offers to New Testament scholarship is on the level of epistemology, though this is never discussed as such. It comes at a time when many in the guild are asking philosophical questions about their methods and subject matter, often without the benefit of any serious philosophical training. Johnson's work is a good example of how probity in the use of history and creativity in the search for philosophical insights can render more intelligible the realities mediated by the ancient texts, especially those of the New Testament itself. By setting experience at the center of his study he forces himself and his readers to ask serious questions about the nature of experience and the nature of the communicative acts by which experience is mediated. This is the undoubted strength of the book whose weaknesses are those ofan effort to include hitherto untried approaches in New Testament study. It is with respect for what Johnson has accomplished that I would like to enter into dialogue with him about some aspects of his work. I will discuss each chapter in turn. After establishing the unavoidable fact that the NewTestamentauthors are speaking about realities that have impinged upon their lives and are speaking to others who share this experience, Johnson goes on to analyze the failure of historians to take this dimension into account in their attempts to understand the presence of early Christianity in history. There is, first of all, the intellectualist approach which seeks to find the "essence of Christianity" underneath the ecclesiastical, mythic, and...